At the age of five, Sullivan, along with her parents and brother moved to California from her home in Indiana where she was born. They stopped on the way to visit her grandparents on their farm in North Dakota. It was here
that she rode her first horse, named Ruby, which belonged to her uncle, and fell in love with Caesar and Billy, two draft plow horses.
She could be found in the barn every evening waiting for Caesar and Billy to come in from the fields to be unharnessed.
These experiences left an indelible impression in her life.
Arriving in California and longing to still be around horses, she saved pennies, nickels and dimes, not counting the times she conned her uncles, until she had 50 cents to rent
a horse at the stable not far from her house. She fell asleep to Roy Rogers, Dale Evans and the Lone Ranger on the radio. Sullivan's creativity was also evident
at this time when she almost burned the house down creating a life like campfire from Easter basket grass and birthday candles for her little
plastic cowboys and horses.
A desire to create grew in her as she watched her grandmother draw children with color pencils on the grey dividers in shredded wheat boxes. A pencil drawing
of a horse's head submitted to a television program for children wan Barbara her first recognition.
In the 1950's Sullivan's family, which now included two sisters, once again moved, this time to Las Vegas, Nevada. Her mother developed a lung problem after working in the shipyards
during World War II and her doctor thought it best that she move to a desert climate. Las Vegas, at that time, was a town of fifty thousand; small compared to the over two million
residents it has today.
In the mid 1970's, Sullivan started painting and it wasn't long before her talent was recognized. She was asked to represent
the 1976 Boulder City Arts Festival in Boulder City, Nevada. She won First, Second and Third Place Awards at the Jaycee State Fair in 1977 and in 1981 Barbara Sullivan's painting
Winter Splendor was selected to represent the Christmas Arts Festival sponsored by the City of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Art Museum. The painting was purchased by Nevada National Bank for their corporate
collection. In 1983 the City of Las Vegas selected Barbara Sullivan as one of three artists to exhibit in the newly completed U.S. Federal Building.
Sullivan's first oil painting workshop was with well known artist, Leslie B. DeMill. Starting with a still life set up, she learned to see and paint
shapes, perspective, value and color just to mention a few of the basics. She says, "Realism is abstract art. When the abstract shapes of value and color
are put together as seen, they form realism". With this understanding, she said, it is easy to slip into painting portraits. From the things she learned ,
she was able to teach and show other artists the basics of what it takes to paint representational art.
It was natural for Barbara Sullivan to paint the Native American. Her great-grandmother was from the Iroquois Nation of Native Americans. Sullivan loves the outdoors, her horses (a gift from her husband), the stories
she heard from her grandmother, the history of the Native American people and the West. "Riding horseback through the desert or over the mountains...feeling the warm wind on my face or listening to the soft crunch of
snow under her horse's hooves...evoke memories and feelings that influence my work today.
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